A Friendly Chat: Damian Mason, Farmer, Corporate Comedian, Bill Clinton Impersonator

Damian Mason is a Bill Clinton impersonator, a corporate comedian, and a farmer. He attended Purdue University and was selling lighting fixtures in San Diego when he won a costume contest dressed as Bill Clinton and decided to make a go of it. Today he still does his Bill Clinton show but he also does two shows as himself: one for corporate events, and one for agriculture conferences. Mason is the kind of man that uses your name when he talks to you, and he asked me just as many questions about myself as I did about him. When we spoke, it was lunch time in Indiana. He had just come inside after working on his ranch.

DAMIAN MASON: I'm glancing around at The Awl while we're talking. How do these guys make their money? I see a little bit of advertising for a movie.

THE AWL: I'm not sure! I don't think they do yet!

DAMIAN MASON: It's a very difficult thing to get paid to write. Years and years ago I set a personal goal that I wanted to become a better writer. I'm from Indiana, I was raised on a dairy farm here in Northern Indiana, and had lived in Indianapolis, Chicago, San Diego, Phoenix, and I came back. I live on a farm, a couple hundred acre farm. And I got back here and I contacted newspapers here, and I had three newspapers in Indiana and one newspaper in Kentucky that were carrying me. I really worked at it pretty hard, called editors of small to midsize papers. My goal was to have a dozen, then two dozen. And I tried it, I sent stuff out to syndicates, and I never got anywhere with that… I'm a big fan of newspapers, I read the newspapers. But most people your age, they say, oh I don't need the paper, I get my news on the Internet. But where the hell do they think that comes from? Two dudes at a blog dot com didn't spend three months investigating Enron for an article.

THE AWL: You were already doing your Corporate Comedy at this point?

DAMIAN MASON: Years ago I was a lighting fixture salesperson, and when I was 25 years old, I wasn't enjoying my job that much. I quit my job because I won a Halloween contest dressed up as Bill Clinton in San Diego. I quit my job and became a professional Bill Clinton impersonator. My company used me at trade shows and meetings. I'd dress up as Bill Clinton, make some yuks, have some laughs, take some pictures. I started doing shows on the side, companies, groups, anyone that had 300 bucks I'd do a show for them.

THE AWL: Did you see this as taking off?

DAMIAN MASON: People like to believe, I'm speaking very frankly with you, people with normal jobs, that sit in a cubicle and work for somebody, want to believe that there's never any risk, that' you're just hanging out, drinking beer at a Halloween contest and someone discovered you and made this happen. Well, fuck no, that's not how it happened! I won a goddamned Halloween contest and won some money and I was still selling lighting fixtures! … I'm entrepreneurial by nature. Trust me, I've heard the degrading remarks, and you've got to shake it off, and I'm talking very frankly, and I'm sorry if you're religious, but every asshole says, "You're making $7500 a show—I wish I looked like Bill Clinton!" But if you looked like Bill Clinton, you'd still be sitting in accounting in your cubicle, complaining about your job.

THE AWL: When did you start doing your other show, as you?

DAMIAN MASON: We always knew the Bill Clinton thing was going to slow down, obviously. No one is doing a Rutherford B. Hayes show…. And it was much more difficult to become Damian Mason than I thought, I thought it'd be a lot easier… Now, not to sound arrogant, but we're starting to roll with the program I do as me. And it's been 7 or 8 years, and it's been a lot of work. I still do my Bill Clinton show, I just did two of them last week. But I'm not going to do a 100 of them a year like I used to do back in the old days.

THE AWL: How much are you traveling?

DAMIAN MASON: This year, let's say I'll do 60 shows, and if you do 60 shows, that's like 100 or 120 days of travel. Sometimes you can drive, sometimes you have to be on an airplane and gone for 2 days.

THE AWL: Do you like traveling?

DAMIAN MASON: I don't like sitting in traffic in a commute, either, and I don't like having a normal job. We make our living off of doing my shows, investments and savings I've accumulated over the years, the farm, my wife's interior design company. The bulk of my income is earned doing the show.

THE AWL: Tell me about the farm.

DAMIAN MASON: We have 200 acres. 125 of it is in corn and soybeans. We have 40 acres of timber that we manage for hardwood timber. We have some conservation land, and we have pasture and beef cattle.

THE AWL: Do you still have fun doing the show?

DAMIAN MASON: Yes. I'm being very frank here: what you must do, in this business, is think of yourself as a product. You are a product. These groups are buying you. So I would say: why are these groups buying you? It's not about me, it's about the group. Without this group, without this 400 person sales meeting in Little Rock, Dallas, Baltimore, or wherever USA, without them, why would they have me? And they wouldn't… One thing that a lot of people struggle with in this business, they forget it's not about you, it's about the group. So I try to look at myself as a product, and I'm very critical of what I do and what happens up on stage… And all though you've heard me swearing a little bit, I don't do that from stage. A lot of these people that do clubs cannot get up and be funny without talking about raunchy stuff. My stuff has to be PG-13. I occasionally push it to R, you've got a group of salespeople, there a little bit raucous, yeah, you can push it to R. but you don't do racial stuff, you don't do that other stuff, you don't do anything close to club material.

THE AWL: Is corporate comedy a big industry? Do you have a lot of competition out there?

DAMIAN MASON: You're competing against the person that's the futurist. Do you know what that is? Because I'm still not sure that I do myself. I think they're scam artists. They come in and say, in the future, consumers will do this. Well, how the hell do you know that? I'm a little skeptical of that, but they are the competition, because for $5000 they'll come in and give you 45 minutes of telling you what the future holds for your business. Now: Ask them to put it in writing on a million dollars contract and none of 'em will sign it. My competition is a hypnotist. My competition is a band. My competition is an economist that will come in and tell you what the economy is doing now and what it will do one year from now. My competition is anything you can plug into that timeslot at dinner or at 8 p.m.

THE AWL: It seems like [your job] is part motivational speaker too?

DAMIAN MASON: I don't like that term. This ain't a pep rally. I know that's a very standard term, but I don't like that term because it gives the idea that I'm up there hootin' and hollerin'.

THE AWL: I imagine you get booked for organizations where you can't even believe this organization really exists.

DAMIAN MASON: The National Bankruptcy Institute I did a while back, and they were celebrating that there were over a million bankruptcies in the U.S. for the first time. That was about ten years ago. Now we're getting closer to two million, because it's become very trendy for people to live beyond their means and not save any money. National Industries for the Blind, and this is not being cruel, but I got booked as Bill Clinton, a look-alike coming in to do Bill Clinton to an audience where a third of them were blind. But you know what? They loved it. So there's organizations out there you can't imagine: Scrap Metal Dealers Associations, it goes on and on.

THE AWL: Have the meetings felt different since the economy went bust?

DAMIAN MASON: First off, things are not nearly as bad as the media says. The media needs to be able to manufacture some threat to your life. Mad Cow, SARS, bird flu, swine flu, asbestos, I mean, come on. Then they also love it if they can have some doom and gloom scenario with business, global climate change, whatever, whatever. I'm in these functions and I'm looking at people and I get them laughing and get them rollin' and then I talk about this, and I say let's talk about how bad business is, because it's not. When I hear this compared to the depression, it's a joke. I was just at Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart's crowded. And I went to dinner the other night, and the restaurant was slammed. And you're telling me this is another Great Depression? I will disagree. So I make that point to my audience.

THE AWL: So there's not a difference in your booking from last year?

DAMIAN MASON: I took a hit in May and in June, I had the worst May I ever had, and this month isn't as good either, and I'll tell you why that happened. Along about January, Barack Obama and people in Congress went on TV and said it was irresponsible to have junkets in Las Vegas and be spending money irresponsibly on fancy sales meetings. So all these companies, whether or not they took any government bailout money or not, cancelled their meetings. Las Vegas lost about a gazillion dollars—I made that number up. You might have also known Barack and Michelle Obama had no problem getting on a private jet and sending 500 secret service agents and tying up the streets of New York City for a date. That wasn't irresponsible, but if companies go and have meetings where they conduct business, that's irresponsible. This is not about me liking or disliking whoever's in office, I could care less, my point is: they screwed up this industry by carrying on about meetings. What are you supposed to do, you've got 400 salespeople all around North America, you're supposed to not have a sales meeting? So yeah, my business took a hit, and I'm not blaming the economy, I'm blaming Washington, D.C.

THE AWL: What makes you laugh?

DAMIAN MASON: I don't go to comedy clubs. If I were a bulldozer operator, I wouldn't get off on going to see people run bulldozers. But there's certain things you can only learn from others. So I bought some DVDs of some people that I'm studying, and I bought them all for different reasons. I bought Bob Newhart, because I have a certain dryness to the way I speak and deliver, and so does he. He's old for me, I'm sure you don't even know who he is—

THE AWL: Oh I know who Bob Newhart is.

DAMIAN MASON: Okay. So I though I'd study him a little bit. I find him funny. I got Jerry Seinfeld's DVD. Always loved his television program, thought it was very well done. Sitting down and having a conversation and playing cards and drinking beers with five of my buddies, that makes me laugh. Simple, but I'm a simple guy. I laugh at stuff that is not dumb humor. Everything can't be Mensa humor, because everyone isn't in Mensa. … The show The Office is brilliant, and it's being copied now, and it will be bastardized. And that show came from across the pond anyway, it's an Americanized version of the British show. I like Family Guy, done by Seth MacFarlane. I would actually love to meet Seth MacFarlane sometime. He is way head and shoulders beyond me but I think that show is as good as a television show as there is. It is brilliant beyond brilliant to me. I bet there's about 12 gags per show that the average person doesn't see…. So The Office and Family Guy and you've got to put Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert up there. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is brilliant. He may be a little liberal because I'm a little more conservative, but you don't let that get in the way. For years I did a political comedy show and people would always ask me what my true beliefs were and I would tell them that I read an article in Playboy magazine with an interview with Jay Leno, and they asked Jay why he didn't get more involved with his own political beliefs in his monologue, and he said "There's an old saying among prostitutes: if you start to come with your client, you should get out of business." I know that's a little rated-R quote for you, but it wasn't me that said it, it was Jay Leno. And I sort of adhere to that, I do. By the way the best show that's on television period is not a comedy, it's called Mad Men on AMC.

THE AWL: If you meet someone new, and they say what do you do, how do you describe what you do?

DAMIAN MASON: I probably just say I'm self-employed. I was asked once by a person in customs what I did and I just told them farmer, because I didn't want to get into it. I have a card that my wife says is ridiculous but I hand it out all the time; it just says "Business Man."

THE AWL: So do you see yourself doing this for another 16 years?

DAMIAN MASON: Yeah, I think so. When I first started out we had to put together packages with VCR tapes. And then we did DVDs and CD ROMS and that and now a lot of people just go to my website and check the video out there. So that part has gotten easier…. The travel has gotten harder, it's way less enjoyable than it was, with the TSA, which does not make me feel safer at all. The one thing that I would tell you that bothers me is the distractions. We did a show on Friday at noon and one third of the people wouldn't set their Blackberries down.. I could take any one of those Blackberries and pick it up and say, show me the last 20 communications you were just sending while I was on stage, and it would say things like, "Yeah, not much, how about you, sure, great, see you there, okay, how about 3, call me"—you know what I'm saying? And for that, they're missing out on 45 minutes of really spectacular entertainment, and that's probably the biggest frustration I have… My marketing person asked me if I wanted to do Twitter, she's got me on Facebook and MySpace and all that stuff, and I said, does this mean that a bunch of 14-year-olds are going to try to book me to do a show in their mom and dad's basement? … I was 25 when I quit my job to end up doing this, and I had three shows lined up for the rest of my life, making about $2000. I'm only saying that because the idea that there is going to be a great deal of security when you step out and try something new, there probably won't be a great deal of security. But don't kid yourself. There's no such thing as security. Well, there's not! Do you think these people at these companies that are getting tossed out of business are secure? They're not. Do what you like!

Logan Sachon lives in Portland, Oregon. Ways she makes money: tending flowers, making bouquets. Ways she does not make money: writing, optioning things. She is working on changing the latter.